Web consultant Internship- Bobcat Pride Scholarship

Prior to my start date at BPSF, I worked under the non-profit founder, Heather Aidala, as a web design intern for her day job as Senior Admin Assistant of Academic Affairs at Texas State University. She had been experiencing website builder issues where she was alerted by her hosting service that the company would dissolve within three weeks and urgently needed to transfer her website to another platform. In July of 2023 she reached out to me with the proposal of being BPSFs website consulant as she needed guidance to transfer her existing site to a new platform, and had goals of website redesign. She also needed assistance in website marketing as well as content creation that would appeal to the new Gen-Z audience.

I accepted this position right away with excitement to start a new project. I have always dreamed of working for a non-profit. Finally, I thought. Thanks to Dr. Aidala, I was able to achieve a career milestone, and learn many skills along the way. On this page, I will explain how this internship started, along with the steps we took to get our final project. I will include what challenges we faced, how we overcame them, and share my decision making process.

Step 1. Researching Hosting and Domain Name Transfer

This step was one of most time consuming portion of this internship period, researching hosting services that fit the needs and budget for non-profits can be tedius as well as time consuming. This process includes straight forward communication with the client to determine specific needs that the website will be able to cover, this can be functionallity or content expectations like social media embedding, or content gallery formatting. Overall, understanding a wide range of Content Management Systems as a Web developer and Designer is an essential skill as the chosen CMS could make or break the website.

The first thing I did was create a table of several Hosting Services and compared pricing, usage, SSL, and specific highlights of each service. This was essential for my client to visually compare non-profit needs and wants.

Step 2. Building the New Site

After careful consideration, we chose to use Exact Hosting as our Hosting service and their Website Builder Content Management System. The Website Builder is and has been currently updating their content system throughout the summer and fall semester, allowing me to easily update content and add new feautures to our site.

Building the new site was not as tedius as compared to my prior steps taken to choose the hosting and CMS. We had taken PDF screenshots of the previous site before it was taken down, letting me mimick the content layout with the new Website Builder features.

Step 3. Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics is a platform that measures site performance and engagement, utilzied by many freelance and non-profit organizations. To first utilize Google Analytics, or any performance measurement platform, there must be a discussion between consultant and client taught identifies the performance goals of webpage. This ensures editor or website designer can build features and write copy that are engaging to specific user that the client aims to reach.